“Whipsawed by uncertainty.”

That’s the US labor market in 2025. The description comes from ADP chief economist Nela Richardson who, unlike Erika McEntarfer, can’t be fired by Donald Trump for reporting underwhelming jobs numbers.

In the post-pandemic era, the ADP release lost some of its relevance for traders who, correctly or not (rightly or wrongly) viewed the numbers as increasingly less-reliable for the purposes of predicting the private-sector hiring tally in the BLS’s monthly jobs report.

As BMO’s rates team astutely pointed out earlier this week, that ostensible “weakness” is now the ADP report’s strength given questions about the accuracy of the government data amid poor response rates, outsized revisions and, now, politicization concerns.

On Thursday, ADP said private employers in the US added a mere 54,000 jobs last month, fewer than consensus expected.

July’s headline was revised slightly higher to reflect 106,000 additions. June‘s headline, you’ll kindly recall, showed a 23,000 decline in private hiring.

The three-month moving average for ADP is 46,000 with Thursday’s print. Not exactly gangbusters.

Notably, the breakdown showed a 12,000 loss for education and health services. Those are the sorts of acyclical jobs I spoke about on Wednesday in the context of a JOLTS release which likewise suggested the labor market’s slowing.

Manufacturing also shed jobs in the ADP report, as did trade and transportation. Leisure and hospitality was the biggest hirer, followed by construction. Pay growth was steady at 4.4% for so-called job “stayers” and 7.1% for “changers.”

All in all, this release constituted further evidence to support sundry slowdown narratives, and therefore counts as another argument for insurance cuts beginning at this month’s FOMC meeting.

Commenting further, Richardson said “A variety of things could explain the hiring slowdown, including labor shortages, skittish consumers and AI disruptions.”